Chapter XIII (2)

"Tell me about the girl you were fond of," she said, abruptly.

"What do you want to talk about her for? There's nothing to tell you, really. She had red hair."

Sylvia was glad that Arthur spoke of her with so little interest; it certainly was definitely comforting to feel the utter dispossession of that red-haired girl.

"Look here," said Sylvia. "I'm going to let these people suppose that I'm your long-lost relative. I shall pay their bill and bring the doctor down to see you. Arthur, I'm glad I've found you. Do you remember the cab-horse? Oh, and do you remember the cats in the area and the jug of water that splashed you? You were so unhappy, almost as unhappy as you were when I found you here. Have you always been treated unkindly?"

"I have had a pretty hard time," Arthur said.

"Oh, but you mustn't be sorry for yourself," she laughed.

"No, seriously, Sylvia, I've always had a lot of people against me."

"Yes, but that's such fun. You simply must be amused by life when you're with me. I'm not hard-hearted a bit, really, but you mustn't be offended with me when I tell you that really there's something a tiny bit funny in your being stranded in the Auburn Hotel, Sulphurville."

"I'm glad you think so," said Arthur, in rather a hurt tone of voice.

"Don't be cross, you foolish creature."

"I'm not a bit cross. Only I _would_ like you to understand that my illness isn't a joke. You don't suppose I should let you pay my bills and do all this for me unless it were really something serious."

Sylvia put her hand on his mouth. "I forgive you," she murmured, "because you really are ill. Oh, Arthur, _do_ you remember Hube? What fun everything is!"

Sylvia left him and went down-stairs to arrange matters with Mrs. Lebus.

"It was a relation, after all," she told her. "The Maddens have been related to us for hundreds of years."

"My! My! Now ain't that real queer? Oh, Scipio!"

Mr. Lebus came into view cleaning his nails with the same pen, and was duly impressed with the coincidence.

"Darned if I don't tell Pastor Gollick after next Sunday meeting. He's got a kind of hankering after the ways of Providence. Gee! Why, it's a sermonizing cinch."

There was general satisfaction in the Auburn Hotel over the payment of Arthur's bill.

"Not that I wouldn't have trusted him for another month and more," Mrs. Lebus affirmed. "But it's a satisfaction to be able to turn round and say to the neighbors, 'What did I tell you?' Folks in Sulphurville was quite sure I'd never be paid back a cent. This'll learn them!"

Mr. Lebus, in whose throat the doubts of the neighbors had gathered to offend his faith, cleared them out forever in one sonorous rauque.

The druggist's account was settled, and though, when Sylvia first heard him, he had been doubtful if his medicine was doing the patient any good, he was now most anxious that he should continue with the prescription. That afternoon one of the doctors in residence at the Plutonian visited Arthur and at once advised his removal thither.

Arthur made rapid progress when he was once out of the hospitable squalor of the Auburn Hotel, and the story of Sylvia's discovery of her unfortunate cousin became a romantic episode for all the guests of the Plutonian, a never-failing aid to conversation between wives waiting for their husbands to emerge from their daily torture at the hands of the masseurs, who lived like imps in the sulphurous glooms of the bath below; maybe it even provided the victims themselves with a sufficiently absorbing topic to mitigate the penalties of their cure.

Arthur himself expanded wonderfully as the subject of so much discussion. It gave Sylvia the greatest pleasure to see the way in which his complexion was recovering its old ruddiness and his steps their former vigor; but she did not approve of the way in which the story kept pace with Arthur's expansion. She confided to him how very personally the news of the sick Englishman had affected her and how she had made up her mind from the beginning that it was a stranded actor, and afterward, when she heard in the drug-store the name Madden, that it actually was Arthur himself. He, however, was unable to stay content with such an incomplete telepathy; indulging human nature's preference for what is not true, both in his own capacity as a liar and in his listeners' avid and wanton credulity, he transferred a woman's intimate hopes into a quack's tale.

"Then you didn't see your cousin's spirit go up in the elevator when you were standing in the lobby? Now isn't that perfectly discouraging?" complained a lady with an astral reputation in Illinois.

"I'm afraid the story's been added to a good deal," Sylvia said. "I'm sorry to disappoint the faithful."

"She's shy about giving us her experiences," said another lady from Iowa. "I know I was just thrilled when I heard it. It seemed to me the most wonderful story I'd ever imagined. I guess you felt kind of queer when you saw him lying on a bed in your room."

"He was in his own room," Sylvia corrected, "and I didn't feel at all queer. It was he who felt queer."

"Isn't she secretive?" exclaimed the lady from Illinois. "Why, I was going to ask you to write it up in our society's magazine, _The Flash_. We don't print any stories that aren't established as true. Well, your experience has given me real courage, Miss Scarlett. Thank you."

The astral enthusiast clasped Sylvia's hand and gazed at her as earnestly as if she had noticed a smut on her nose.

"Yes, I'm sure we ought to be grateful," said the lady from Iowa. "My! Our footsteps are treading in the unseen every day of our lives! You certainly are privileged," she added, wrapping Sylvia in a damp mist of benign fatuity.

"I wish you wouldn't elaborate everything so," Sylvia begged of Arthur when she had escaped from the deification of the two psychical ladies. "It makes me feel so dreadfully old to see myself assuming a legendary shape before my own eyes. It's as painful as being stuffed alive--stuffed alive with nonsense," she added, with a laugh.

Arthur's expansion, however, was not merely grafted on Sylvia's presentiment of his discovery in Sulphurville; he blossomed upon his own stock, a little exotically, perhaps, like the clumps of fiery cannas in the grounds of the hotel, but with a quite conspicuous effectiveness. Like the cannas, he required protection from frost, for there was a very real sensitiveness beneath all that flamboyance, and it was the knowledge of this that kept Sylvia from criticizing him at all severely. Besides, even if he did bask a little too complacently in expressions of interest and sympathy, it was a very natural reaction from his wretched solitude at the Auburn Hotel, for which he could scarcely be held culpable, least of all by herself. Moreover, was not this so visible recovery the best tribute he could have paid to her care? If he appeared to strut--for, indeed, there was a hint of strutting in his demeanor--he only did so from a sense of well-being. Finally, if any further defense was necessary, he was an Englishman among a crowd of Americans; the conditions demanded a good deal of competitive self-assertion.

Meanwhile summer was gone; the trees glowed with every shade of crimson. Sylvia could not help feeling that there was something characteristic in the demonstrative richness of the American fall; though she was far from wishing to underrate its beauty, the display was oppressive. She sighed for the melancholy of the European autumn, a conventional emotion, no doubt, but so closely bound up with old associations that she could not wish to lose it. This cremation of summer, these leafy pyrotechnics, this holocaust of color, seemed a too barbaric celebration of the year's death. It was significant that autumn with its long-drawn-out suggestion of decline should here have failed to displace fall; for there was something essentially catastrophic in this ruthless bonfire of foliage. It was not surprising that the aboriginal inhabitants should have been redskins, nor that the gorgeousness of nature should have demanded from the humanity it overwhelmed a readjustment of decorative values which superficial observers were apt to mistake for gaudy ostentation. Sylvia could readily imagine that if she had been accustomed from childhood to these crimson woods, these beefy robins, and these saucer-eyed daisies, she might have found her own more familiar landscapes merely tame and pretty; but as it was she felt dazzled and ill at ease. It's a little more and how much it is, she told herself, pondering the tantalizing similarity that was really as profoundly different as an Amazonian forest from Kensington Gardens.

Arthur's first flamboyance was much toned down by all that natural splendor; in fact, it no longer existed, and Sylvia found a freshening charm in his company amid these crimson trees and unfamiliar birds, and in this staring white hotel with its sulphurous exhalations. His complete restoration to health, moreover, was a pleasure and a pride that nothing could mar, and she found herself planning his happiness and prosperity as if she had already transferred to him all she herself hoped from life.

At the end of September the long-expected remittance arrived from Mrs. Madden, and Sylvia gathered from the letter that the poor lady had been much puzzled to send the money.

"We must cable it back to her at once," Sylvia said.

"Oh, well, now it's come, is that wise?" Arthur objected. "She may have had some difficulty in getting it, but that's over now."

"No, no. It must be cabled back to her. I've got plenty of money to carry us on till we begin to work together."

"But I can't go on accepting charity like this," Arthur protested. "It's undignified, really. I've never done such a thing before."

"You accepted it from your mother."

"Oh, but my mother's different."

"Only because she's less able to afford it than I am," Sylvia pointed out. "Look, she's sent you fifty pounds. Think how jolly it would be for her suddenly to receive fifty pounds for herself."

Arthur warmed to the idea; he could not resist the picture of his mother's pleasure, nor the kind of inverted generosity with which it seemed to endow himself. He talked away about the arrival of the money in England till it almost seemed as if he were sending his mother the accumulation of hard-earned savings to buy herself a new piano; that was the final purpose to which, in Arthur's expanding fancy, the fifty pounds was to be put. Sylvia found his attitude rather boyish and charming, and they had an argument, on the way to cable the money back, whether it would be better for Mrs. Madden to buy a Bechstein or a Blüthner.

Sylvia's contract with the Plutonian expired with the first fortnight of October, and they decided to see what likelihood there was of work in New York before they thought of returning to Europe. They left Sulphurville with everybody's good wishes, because everybody owed to their romantic meeting an opportunity of telling a really good ghost story at first hand, with the liberty of individual elaboration.

New York was very welcome after Sulphurville. They passed the wooded heights of the Hudson at dusk in a glow of somber magnificence softened by the vapors of the river. It seemed to Sylvia that scarcely ever had she contemplated a landscape of such restrained splendor, and she thought of that young New-Yorker who had preferred not to travel more than fifty miles west of his native city, though the motive of his loyalty had most improbably been the beauty of the Hudson. She wondered if Arthur appreciated New York, but he responded to her enthusiasm with the superficial complaints of the Englishman, complaints that when tested resolved themselves into conventional formulas of disapproval.

"I suppose trite opinions are a comfortable possession," Sylvia said. "But a good player does not like a piano that is too easy. You complain of the morning papers' appearing shortly after midnight, but confess that in your heart you prefer reading _them_ in bed to reading a London evening paper, limp from being carried about in the pocket and with whatever is important in it illegible."

"But the flaring head-lines," Arthur protested. "You surely don't like them?"

"Oh, but I do!" she avowed. "They're as much more amusing than the dreary column beneath as tinned tongue is nicer than the dry undulation for which you pay twice as much. Head-lines are the poetry of journalism, and, after all, what would the Parthenon be without its frieze?"

"Of course you'd argue black was white," Arthur said.

"Well, that's a better standpoint than accepting everything as gray."

"Most things are gray."

"Oh no, they're not! Some things are. Old men's beards and dirty linen and Tschaikowsky's music and oysters and Wesleyans."

"There you go," he jeered.

"Where do I go?"

"Right off the point," said Arthur, triumphantly. "No woman can argue."

"Oh, but I'm not a woman," Sylvia contradicted. "I'm a mythical female monster, don't you know--one of those queer beasts with claws like hay-rakes and breasts like peg-tops and a tail like a fish."

"Do you mean a Sphinx?" Arthur asked, in his literal way. He was always rather hostile toward her extravagant fancies, because he thought it dangerous to encourage a woman in much the same way as he would have objected to encouraging a beggar.

"No, I really meant a grinx, which is rather like a Sphinx, but the father was a griffin--the mother in both cases was a minx, of course."

"What was the father of the Sphinx?" he asked, rather ungraciously.

Sylvia clapped her hands.

"I knew you wouldn't be able to resist the question. A sphere--a woman's sphere, of course, which is nearly as objectionable a beast as a lady's man."

"You do talk rot sometimes," said Arthur.

"Don't you ever have fancies?" she demanded, mockingly.

"Yes, of course, but practical fancies."

"Practical fancies," Sylvia echoed. "Oh, my dear, it sounds like a fairy in Jaeger combinations! You don't know what fun it is talking rot to you, Arthur. It's like hoaxing a chicken with marbles. You walk away from my conversation with just the same disgusted dignity."

"You haven't changed a bit," Arthur proclaimed. "You're just the same as you were at fifteen."

Sylvia, who had been teasing him with a breath of malice, was penitent at once; after all, he had once run away with her, and it would be difficult for any woman of twenty-eight not to rejoice a little at the implication of thirteen undestructive years.

"That last remark was like a cocoanut thrown by a monkey from the top of the cocoanut-palm," she said. "You meant it to be crushing, but it was crushed instead, and quite deliciously sweet inside."

All the time that Sylvia had been talking so lightly, while the train was getting nearer and nearer to New York, there had lain at the back of her mind the insistent problem of her relationship to Arthur. The impossibility of their going on together as friends and nothing more had been firmly fixed upon her consciousness for a long time now, and the reason of this was to be sought for less in Arthur than in herself. So far they had preserved all the outward semblances of friendship, but she knew that one look from her eyes deep into his would transform him into her lover. She gave Arthur credit for telling himself quite sincerely that it would be "caddish" to make love to her while he remained under what he would consider a grave obligation; and because with his temperament it would be as much in the ordinary routine of the day to make love to a woman as to dress himself in the morning. She praised his decorum and was really half grateful to him for managing to keep his balance on the very small pedestal that she had provided. She might fairly presume, too, that if she let Arthur fall in love with her he would wish to marry her. Why should she not marry him? It was impossible to answer without accusing herself of a cynicism that she was far from feeling, yet without which she could not explain even to herself her quite definite repulsion from the idea of marrying him. The future, really, now, the very immediate future, must be flung to chance; it was hopeless to arrogate to her forethought the determination of it; besides, here was New York already.

"We'd better go to my old hotel," Sylvia suggested. Was it the reflection of her own perplexity, or did she detect in Arthur's accents a note of relief, as if he too had been watching the Palisades of the Hudson and speculating upon the far horizon they concealed?

They dined at Rector's, and after dinner they walked down Broadway into Madison Square, where upon this mild October night the Metropolitan Tower, that best of all the Gargantuan baby's toys, seemed to challenge the indifferent moon. They wandered up Madison Avenue, which was dark after the winking sky-signs of Broadway and with its not very tall houses held a thought of London in the darkness. But when Sylvia turned to look back it was no longer London, for she could see the great, illuminated hands and numerals of the clock in the Metropolitan flashing from white to red for the hour. This clock without a dial-plate was the quietest of the Gargantuan baby's toys, for it did not strike; one was conscious of the almost pathetic protest against all those other damnably noisy toys: one felt he might become so enamoured of its pretty silence that to provide himself with a new diversion he might take to doubling the hours to keep pace with the rapidity of the life with which he played.

"It's almost as if we were walking up Haverstock Hill again," said Arthur.

"And we're grown up now," Sylvia murmured. "Oh, dreadfully grown up, really!"

They walked on for a while in silence. It was impossible to keep back the temptation to cheat time by leaping over the gulf of years and being what they were when last they walked along together like this. Sylvia kept looking over her shoulder at the bland clock hanging in the sky behind them; at this distance the fabric of the tower had melted into the night and was no longer visible, which gave to the clock a strange significance and made it a simulacrum of time itself.

"You haven't changed a bit," she said.

"Do you remember when you told me I looked like a cow? It was after"--he breathed perceptibly faster--"after I kissed you."

She would not ascribe his remembering what she had called him to an imperfectly healed scar of vanity, but with kindlier thoughts turned it to a memento of his affection for her. After all, she had loved him then; it had been a girl's love, but did there ever come with age a better love than that first flushed gathering of youth's opening flowers?

"Sylvia, I've thought about you ever since. When you drove me away from Colonial Terrace I felt like killing myself. Surely we haven't met again for nothing."

"Is it nothing unless I love you?" she asked, fiercely, striving to turn the words into weapons to pierce the recesses of his thoughts and blunt themselves against a true heart.

"Ah no, I won't say that," he cried. "Besides, I haven't the right to talk about love. You've been--Sylvia, I can't tell you what you've been to me since I met you again."

"If I could only believe--oh, but believe with all of me that was and is and ever will be--that I could have been so much."

"You have, you have."

"Don't take my love as a light thing," she warned him. "It's not that I'm wanting so very much for myself, but I want to be so much to you."

"Sylvia, won't you marry me? I couldn't ever take your love lightly. Indeed. Really."

"Ah, it's not asking me to marry you that means you're serious. I'm not asking you what your intentions are. I'm asking if you want me."

"Sylvia, I want you dreadfully."

"Now, now?" she pressed.

"Now and always."

They had stopped without being aware of it. A trolley-car jangled by, casting transitory lights that wavered across Arthur's face, and Sylvia could see how his eyes were shining. She dreaded lest by adding a few conventional words he should spoil what he had said so well, but he waited for her, as in the old days he had always waited.

"You're not cultivating this love, like a convalescent patient does for his nurse?" Sylvia demanded.

She stopped herself abruptly, conscious that every question she put to him was ultimately being put to herself.

"Did I ever not love you?" he asked. "It was you that grew tired of me. It was you that sent me away."

"Don't pretend that all these years you've been waiting for me to come back," she scoffed.

"Of course not. What I'm trying to explain is that we can start now where we left off; that is, if you will."

He held out his hand half timidly.

"And if I won't?"

The hand dropped again to his side, and there was so much wounded sensitiveness in the slight gesture that Sylvia caught him to her as if he were a child who had fallen and needed comforting.

"When I first put my head on your shoulder," she murmured. "Oh, how well I can remember the day--such a sparkling day, with London spread out like life at our feet. Now we're in the middle of New York, but it seems just as far away from us two as London was that day--and life," she added, with a sigh.